Cons

Bottom Line

With a newly available Intel Core i9 CPU and updated AMD Radeon Pro graphics, the 2019 reboot of the 27-inch Apple iMac all-in-one is now as powerful as it is beautiful.

30 Mar 2019

Does America's love affair with mobile apps and the Apple iPhone leave any room for the iMac, the all-in-one computer that firmly cemented Apple as one of the world's most iconic brands? The iMac's latest update suggests that Apple knows the iMac is still in a good place. The new model brings a welcome performance improvement, but nothing more. The 27-inch version reviewed here (starts at $1,799; $3,449 as tested) puts cutting-edge components into a PC design that's exquisite but familiar, having changed little since 2015. This modern classic is your only option for a large-screen, macOS-based all-in-one. Fortunately, it remains an excellent one.

The Improvements Are All Inside

You can't see the new features on the 27-inch iMac, at least not without prying it open and voiding the included one-year warranty. That's because they're all about refreshed processors, GPUs, and memory tweaks.

The CPU options now include either a 3GHz, six-core Intel Core i5, or the eight-core, 2.6GHz Intel Core i9 in our review model. The latter is from Intel's latest and greatest 9th Generation "Coffee Lake" line.

New graphics options include Radeon Pro 500-series GPUs with either 4GB or 8GB of video memory, or the Radeon Pro Vega 48 in our review unit. The Vega 48 is a significant upgrade, because it moves the 27-inch iMac just below the entry-level iMac Pro, with its Radeon Pro Vega 56. For people who need lots of graphics muscle but don't care about the Xeon CPU or other elite accoutrements that make up the iMac Pro's lofty $5,000 starting price, the 27-inch iMac is now a more viable option.

The iMac is available in 21-inch and 27-inch screen sizes, but I believe that the latter looks the best on your desk, assuming you've got enough room. That's because its proportions seem the most appropriate. The large black borders—bezels—that surround the display are thick and prominent, matching the reflective black Apple logo mounted at the bottom center. On the 21-inch iMac, these borders seem oversize relative to the screen size and incongruous in a world of ever-slimming bezels on competing all-in-ones and large PC monitors.

With its much larger screen, however, the 27-inch iMac takes these borders in stride, managing to make them look sleek and modern. The rest of the iMac mirrors that classy, minimalist look, clad in the same brushed-silver aluminum case that's been around since 2015. Apple describes it as simple, stylish, and uncluttered, and I tend to agree. I also think the Space Gray iMac Pro and MacBooks look even better, but the iMac remains available only in silver.

Stand included, the system measures 20.3 by 25.6 by 8 inches (HWD) and weighs 20.8 pounds. The stand lets you tilt the iMac forward or back, but as ever, it doesn't feature height adjustment. That makes it much less flexible than the stands on two of the iMac's chief competitors. Both the Dell XPS 27 and the Microsoft Surface Studio 2 are far more flexible, with stands that even allow you to lay them flat on your desk.

In lieu of the stand, you can opt for an iMac with a VESA mounting bracket preinstalled, for mounting it to the wall or a third-party stand. In either case, the dimensions compare favorably with one of the iMac's chief Windows-based competitors, the Dell XPS 27. That all-in-one PC is roughly the same size (17 by 25 by 3 inches without stand), but its abundance of built-in speakers makes it an astonishing 38 pounds, far too unwieldy to rotate should you need to plug peripherals into the rear ports.

The iMac, by contrast, is easy to swivel with one hand on your desk, which is a good thing because all of its ports are mounted at the rear, along the right edge. These include four USB 3.0 Type-A ports, two oval-shaped USB Type-C ports with Thunderbolt 3 support, a Gigabit Ethernet jack, a full-size SD card slot, a headphone jack, and the port for the power adapter.

The inclusion of USB Type-A ports is especially notable, since they're required to charge Apple mobile devices using their included power adapters, but absent from all but one of Apple's MacBook laptop models. The iMac also includes a Kensington-style locking slot mounted behind the stand, and a power button on the lower left edge.

Notably absent from the port selection is a dedicated video output. The 27-inch iMac can support up to two external 4K monitors with 60Hz refresh rates, but you'll likely need to buy USB-C-to-DisplayPort or USB-C-to-HDMI adapters to connect them.

The Usual Stunning Retina Display

Meanwhile, returning to the front face of the 2019 iMac, the Retina 5K display is the same great screen as ever. "Retina" means different things on different Apple devices, but with a native resolution of 5,120 by 2,880 pixels and support for 1 billion colors, this screen is the peak of the family and among the best you can find on any all-in-one. Text is razor-sharp, and macOS Finder windows look gorgeous.

The screen was one of the main upgrades during the 2017 iMac refresh, when Apple increased its brightness to the current 500-nit maximum. It covers 100 percent of the sRGB spectrum, 87 percent of NTSC, and 92 percent of Adobe RGB, according to the colorimeter tests PC Labs performed in 2017. It's the same screen now, which means that Apple elected not to add the TrueTone automatic white-balance adjustment that is now available on some of its other products.

There's also no touch screen on the iMac. Consumer all-in-one PCs are some of the key beneficiaries of touch support in Windows 10, letting family members swipe through calendars or casserole recipes. But Apple is persistent in withholding full-screen touch support from macOS. Fortunately, a host of third-party accessories, like the Logitech Craft keyboard, offer alternative input methods for creative pros who might otherwise be attracted to the Surface Studio and its numerous input options.

Apple includes a wireless Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse 2 with the iMac, upgradable to a Magic Keyboard with number pad and a Magic Trackpad 2 for an additional charge. I find the peripherals as exquisitely designed—as desk candy—as the rest of the iMac, and appreciate that they come already charged and paired with the computer.

But they're not very comfortable. The keyboard is cramped and offers very short key travel, though not quite as short as the beleaguered butterfly-switch board on the MacBook Pro, which has resulted in recalls and lawsuits. The mouse is also too flat for my liking and can't be charged and used at the same time, since its Lightning charging port is located on the back side.

You can make FaceTime calls using the webcam centered above the display. It offers adequate video quality, though it's a shame that Apple didn't update its resolution to the full HD (1080p) that the iMac Pro's camera boasts. There's also no ability to log in using face recognition, a key feature on the iPhone, iPad, and many Windows laptops and desktops.

Audio quality is excellent, with the iMac's stereo speakers offering dimensional sound and surprisingly robust bass while I listened to the bass-heavy track "The Knife" by Silent Shout. They're still no match for the Dell XPS 27's astonishing audio quality, made possible by its six front-firing speakers and four downward-firing ones.

Wireless connections include 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2, while storage options include either SSD/hard disk Fusion Drives, or single solid-state drives (SSDs). The latter is a more expensive choice, but it ensures the fastest storage performance. Our review unit comes with a 512GB SSD, which is a relatively small capacity for such an expensive machine. With ever-decreasing SSD prices, I wish Apple would ditch the Fusion Drives and move exclusively to superior SSDs. The company isn't alone in sticking with combo drives, though: They're also offered on the Dell XPS 27.

The new iMac features upgraded 2,666MHz DDR4 memory, which the Mac mini also uses. It's available in 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB capacities. Although faster memory is a nice marginal benefit, if you're a power user who frequently browses the web with dozens of tabs open, the amount of memory you choose is far more important than the speed. The 16GB or 32GB capacities are the sweet spots; our review unit comes with 16GB.

The iMac ships with macOS Mojave, a largely bloatware-free operating system as exquisitely designed as the iMac itself. For more on the new features in Mojave, check out our full review of the OS.

The iMac i9: Knocking Out Better Performance

Apple's main goal with the 2019 iMac refresh is eking out better performance, and based on PCMag's testing, it appears to have accomplished this with aplomb in the Core i9-powered version. Although Apple doesn't publish the specific CPU models it uses, the specs it does publish suggest that the iMac is using Intel's Core i9-9900K. This is a proficient but pricey CPU, retailing for $499 if bought separately. The performance of this multithreaded chip is also quite well-rounded. Its eight cores and 16 threads can chew through threaded workflows like rendering video, while its 5GHz maximum clock speed can attack "bursty" workflows like creating financial or meteorological models.

So it's no surprise that the 27-inch iMac smoked its 21-inch little sibling, equipped with a Core i5 CPU, on our performance benchmarks. I compared these two machines with the XPS 27 and the Surface Studio 2, with configurations listed below.

One of the most important measures of aptitude for challenging workflows is the Cinebench test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. It stresses the CPU to render a complex image, resulting in a proprietary score...

The iMac's score of 1,734 on this test is notable, not necessarily because it's nearly twice as high as the cheaper 21-inch iMac's, but because it's comparable with the iMac Pro's score and light years ahead of the Surface Studio 2's score. In the configuration we tested, the Surface Studio 2 is $4,199, or nearly $800 more than the 27-inch iMac.

The Cinebench score is theoretical, but our Adobe Photoshop CC test is an example of an actual scenario that an iMac owner is likely to perform frequently. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time. The Photoshop test stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.

That is indeed the case with the 27-inch iMac, which completed this test in less than two and a half minutes. The Surface Studio 2, with its Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, didn't come close. We tested the XPS 27 and iMac Pro using an old version of this test with different methodology, so they are not represented in the chart.

Since the Photoshop test uses more computing resources than Cinebench does, much of the 27-inch iMac's advantage here is likely due to our review unit's excellent SSD and bumped-up Radeon Pro GPU. The SSD can write data at an average of 1,915MBps and read it at an average of 2,548MBps, as measured by the Blackmagic benchmark test. Compare that with read speeds of 700MBps and write speeds of 1,110MBps for the 21-inch iMac, which uses a slower Fusion Drive.

Likewise, the Radeon Pro Vega 48 has twice the video memory and more than twice the graphics-core count as the Vega 20 in the 2019 21-inch iMac PC Labs tested. On the Cinebench OpenGL test, which measures graphics performance by simulating a short scene from a car-racing video game, the 27-inch offered 151 frames per second (fps), while the 21-inch offered just 118fps.

iDeserve Your Investment

While the 2017 iMac delivered faster components, newer ports, and a brighter display than its 2015 predecessor, the 2019 version offers only the first improvement. Thanks to the Core i9 and Radeon Pro Vega 48, it is a significant one, but at more than $3,000, it is also an expensive one.

Still, competitors like the Surface Studio 2 can be even more expensive and offer lesser computing performance, at least in the configurations we reviewed. On a performance-per-dollar basis, then, the iMac holds its own in a way that Apple computers frequently haven't done in the past.

Apple chose to only update the iMac's processors, memory, and storage, but these components aren't the only basis on which to select a computer, of course. The iMac is lucky to excel in several other areas, such as head-turning styling, a gorgeous screen, and an excellent software complement. But it falls short with no touch support and little stand flexibility. Its basic design is also four years old, an eternity in personal-tech years.

These deficiencies, ultimately, aren't major enough for us to withdraw from recommending the 27-inch iMac as one of the best all-in-one computers you can buy, however. If you are lucky enough to be in the market for a $3,000 all-in-one PC, few other systems are well-rounded enough to deserve your dollars.

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About the Author

Tom is PCMag's San Francisco-based news reporter. He got his start in technology journalism by reviewing the latest hard drives, keyboards, and much more for PCMag's sister site, Computer Shopper. As a freelancer, he's written on topics as diverse as Borneo's rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and big data's role in presidential elections. A graduate of Middlebury College, Tom also has a master's journalism degree from New York University. Follow him on Twitter @branttom. See Full Bio